Social networking or creepy Internet stalkerbot?

[mithriltabby]

I just got invited to a social network called Spock, which is a Web 2.0-ish thing where you can establish links to people and tag them with various qualities, which people can vote on as relevant or not. In addition to doing this in a participatory manner, it also happens automatically as their search engine trawls the Net— even if you didn’t create a profile there already. You folks might want to check there and see what the “Spock Robot” has tagged you with...

Comments

[devonapple.livejournal.com]

There are two more people with my name! Like Mechanon, I must track them down and end them and their blight upon Spock.com.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I typed in my home town and found out who our high school yearbook was named after. Then I typed in a planetary scientist I know here in California, with a name I figured might not be hugely common, and found they've got a paper that could be by him but they think he lives and works in Florida. Then I typed in an ex of mine and found six of him none of whom were right. Then I found out how much my mother-in-law -- if it is really she -- donated to the Democratic Party last year. They know nothing else about her though.

I think I'm not worried. :-)

(I know: that's easy for me to say, with a name like Smith.)

[mithriltabby]

There are multiple risks with this one: people maliciously tagging you, the bot ascribing your works to other people, the bot ascribing other folks’ work to you...

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

EW! EW! EW!

I'm in there - TWICE - and tagged. Accurately, thank god, but EW!! Do not want!

[(Anonymous)]

My name doesn't come up at all. I think I want to leave it that way.

[ladydairine.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was me. Damn site logged me out.

[mithriltabby]

I figured as much when the IP address said Santa Clara University, but I thought you were making a point by deliberately being anonymous.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I may be slow here, but I'm not perceiving a risk yet. What the bot says about me matters only if someone whose opinion I value believes it, right? I'm guessing few people will perceive much on the Spock site as accurate.

[mithriltabby]

I’m hoping that’s how it works out. If a potential employer is going to reject someone based on what other people tag them with on an open web site, is anyone really going to want to work there?

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

Curiously, I tried to follow your link, and it resolved
to the graphic at this location rather than anything
that looked like the real web site:

http://images.spock.com/fail.jpg

In case this doesn't show up, there's a big word
"FAIL!" under a picture of a soccer ball pressing
deep into someone's face.

Perhaps someone got annoyed by spock's prying and hacked the site?

[mithriltabby]

Probably you caught it during a moment when a database was offline.

[ladydairine.livejournal.com]

I thought about it...

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

So how the hell do I neuter it?

(There are two people with my first/last name listed. Some of the things in the second listing are not me. Others are.)

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Um, ok, icky.... It's all right that I am known only in a professional capacity through LinkedIn, but it's still unsolicited and creepy. How do I get off it without getting an account?

[mithriltabby]

The FAQ says you can sign up and then ask for your account to be deleted, but I suspect that wouldn’t last too long before more info came up. Claiming a profile for your own and then flagging things that are you as relevant and aren’t you as not relevant (and suggesting that your friends who have reason to know one from the other do the same) is probably the most effective strategy. The notion that you could wind up having to do this for N different companies with the same way of accumulating information could be immensely annoying.

[mithriltabby]

The FAQ says that you need to make your publicly available information no longer public, and then they’ll delete your profile on request.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Who knew that I was the most famous prostitute in Nova Scotia?

Seriously, this mainly seems to be yanking public information on people, so I don't see a reason to raise a fuss. I already assume that everything I write on the Intarweb is public square material.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

We'll talk about this tonight.

[mithriltabby]

It’s the tagging capacities that are most open to abuse. And it could be an unpleasant surprise for people who do things that might affect their employability and post about it online, relying on security through obscurity. I expect this will lead to some people becoming intensely private about their online presence, and other people developing a “if you care about that, you don’t deserve to be able to employ me” attitude.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

I had to use Lisa Deutsch Harrigan to find me. Lisa Harrigan didn't seem to find me. I didn't try Lisa Deutsch, I know there are several more of those out there. There are 7 references to Lisa Deutsch Harrigan, all of them are me. All of them are open sources. My LJ account, the MythSoc site, various cons. I've seen most of it already.
I don't understand their tagging system. They seem to be picking up words anyplace on a site and throwing them in as tags. Very stoopid and useless.
One of the things it refers to is ex.plode.us. Which has also gone and found my LJ account and Flickr accounts.
Yeah, I'm out there. But I didn't see anything I haven't seen by googling myself.
It seems a rather stoopid site. I'm not bothering with it.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Personally? Ask me if I care. The more bad information floating around out there, the better - more smoke for me to hide behind.